Typical computing systems, particularly cloud-based systems, employ a hardware component (e.g., a processor) including computing instructions, on top of which is an operating system. In virtualized systems, one or more virtual machines (i.e., a software implementation of a machine) run on top of an operating system, and developers configure applications to run on the virtual machines.
In order to interpret the programming languages used to implement the applications (e.g., Ruby, Perl, Python), a virtual machine interpreter is employed. The virtual machine interpreter is a software program that executes (i.e., performs) instructions provided in the programming language which is native to the respective application. The virtual machine interpreter may either executes the source code directly, translates source the code into some efficient intermediate representation (i.e., code) and immediately executes this representation, or explicitly executes stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.
In a typical arrangement, a user computer may submit a request (e.g., an HTTP request) to an application in a cloud computing environment for processing by a virtualized computing system. The user request is processed by the application and passed to the virtual machine interpreter (level 1), which in turn passes the interpreted request to the operating system (level 2), and the request is then passed to the hardware component for processing (level 3). In this regard, all of the programming languages of the one or more applications go through the virtual machine (e.g., the Java™ Virtual Machine) for interpretation as a software cycle running on a generic hardware component (e.g., a processor), adding to the overall computational expenditure associated with the request. As such, this three-level architecture including a virtual machine interpreter creates significant overhead in the management and processing of user requests, resulting in request processing times on the order of milliseconds.